Roger on Running: Small is Beautiful

As a boy in England long ago I enjoyed stories about an intrepid newspaper sports reporter called McGowan (the author was Allan Aldous.) The episode that made a lifelong impression on me was when McGowan was assigned to cover a big-city professional soccer match, but on the way he got distracted by a humble local game on a muddy suburban field, so he stopped and watched the whole game, and wrote his story about that, because it seemed to him to express the true essence of sport. I sometimes try to do the same. The mega-races of our era are wondrous, but I still love to potter among the grass roots. Last week (August 8) I was at the Great Raisin River Footrace in Williamstown, Ontario.

It was Tom Longboat and Ed Whitlock—two of Canada’s greatest running legends—who lured me up there. Could any two national icons be more different? Longboat (1887-1949) was the Onondaga prodigy from the Six Nations Iroquois Reserve who ran away from school at age 12, won the 1907 Boston Marathon at age 19, became a hero of the first great era of road running, and in September 1908 (after the epic London Olympics) romped away with the Williamstown Fair six-mile “marathon race” (sic).

Whitlock is a wholly post-modern figure, a running superstar at age 79. A silver-haired English-born university graduate mining engineer, he was the first over 70 to break three hours for the marathon. Whitlock was the celebrity “attraction” of the Raisin River field, just as Longboat was at age 21 in 1908, when he made “the Marathon race…the big feature of the Fair,” as Cornwall Freeholder reported it at the time.

A relaxed conversation with Whitlock and a shirt with Longboat’s picture on it fully repaid the trip north. It is also amazing how many threads of the rich weave of modern running come together at a race like the Great Raisin River. It’s off the beaten track—an obscure little shred of grass root—and way off the radar of the weekly racing recaps. But small can be typical as well as beautiful, and this old race, which is full of character, struck me as a microcosm of the global culture of running. It has history, linked with a flourishing agricultural fair nearly 200 years old, reminding us that running has long held a prominent place in community festivities. It has a course (5K and 11K) that embodies running’s equally fundamental link with the land, mostly on gravel roads through woods and farm fields, and along both banks of the river that French-Canadian settlers named after their beloved grape (“raisin”). It offers dedicated organization and warm hospitality offered by the sport’s typical local mix, and by “local” in that context I include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and New York.

And the runner demographic accurately reflects the big picture of modern running in 2010. The entry was a record of 412, nothing to threaten Bay to Breakers, but up 15%, which is consistent with all the graphs. The age range was from six to 79, with a slowly rising median. It included (as so many races do) one Old Faithful (John Duvall), who has run all 32 of the modern versions of the race. (A man who looks that youthful must have been barely a toddler when he first did it.) And it had, for the first time in 32 years, a majority of women. All across North America, this is the year when the ratio is tilting over the 50/50 line. That’s the most striking trend that a small race like Williamstown made evident for those of us with long memories in the sport.

Two runners at Raisin River highlighted how seismic the change is. Kathrine Switzer was there to describe the era when a woman could be physically assaulted by an official for wearing numbers in a race, as she was in 1967. And Louise Wood embodied the formative next wave, those resolute few women in the 1970s who built on the ground that Switzer and others had broken. Wood ran in the very first U.S. women’s marathon championship in 1974, finishing 16th. Three years later, she became the second Canadian woman to break three hours (the first, she told me, was Jo Ann McKinty, now Heale, 2:57:40 in 1975). Knowing how at times I feel incredulous at the sheer numbers now flooding into my eccentric little minority sport (as it used to be), it must be even more astounding for women like Wood to find themselves running in a regular mixed race like Raisin River, but surrounded now by a majority of women, and with chocolate and champagne offered without embarrassment as girly incentives to finish. Committed and deeply informed about running, Wood was a discovery.

So were the feisty women, core of the Raisin River Ramblers, who with directors Sheila and Wendell Lafave did most of the work of registration, finish line, awards, etc. (I privately named them The Magnificent Seven). They also train and socialize together, and travel together to races, and thus typify a small but important segment of the new society of running that no one, I think, has written about—the many small informal groups of women for whom friendship, running and travel have become intertwined. For today’s women runners, the sport is a lot more than a way of losing weight—it is to discover a whole new country, a social focus and personal purpose. As we left, they were in a laughing huddle laying plans for the Dublin Marathon.

I have avoided saying that running has been transformed by this influx of women, and the other influx of older runners like Ed Whitlock. Revitalized, yes, but not transformed. In essence running is just as it always was. The runners at Williamstown in 2010 had to cover the miles of dirt road on foot, as Tom Longboat did in 1908. His six-mile time, 34:57, still has meaning. Whitlock was using this race to sharpen his pace for subsequent marathons, just as Longboat did. It was still a simple enjoyable footrace held in conjunction with a county fair. I thought I found the true essence of sport there, as the fictional sportswriter McGowan did at his suburban soccer game in the 1950s.

The Fair gets the last word: Before I got down to duty as speaker and race announcer, there was time to admire the prize carrots and dahlias and cattle. I missed my favorite sideshow from the Ulster County Fair, Robinson’s Racing Pigs (my future career path, perhaps). Instead there were contests among pairs of huge Clydesdale horses hauling sleds heaped with concrete blocks. I knew how they felt, from the last time I tried to get up Heartbreak Hill.

Roger Robinson has done many things in a lifetime in running, including racing for England and New Zealand, setting masters records at Boston and New York, being stadium announcer at two Commonwealth Games and serving on a national governing body (“but that was like Alcatraz,” he says). Most of his jobs involve finding words to describe or analyze running; he’s a TV and radio commentator, author of three successful books and senior writer for Running Times, for which he has won two U.S. journalism awards. “Roger on Running” will appear monthly on runningtimes.com.

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